41. The Ethics of Women
I have said that the religion preached by Jesus (now wholly extinct
in the world) was highly favourable to women. This was not saying,
of course, that women have repaid the compliment by adopting it.
They are, in fact, indifferent Christians in the primitive sense, just as
they are bad Christians in the antagonistic modern sense, and
particularly on the side of ethics. If they actually accept the
renunciations commanded by the Sermon on the Mount, it is only in
an effort to flout their substance under cover of their appearance.
No woman is really humble; she is merely politic. No woman, with
a free choice before her, chooses self-immolation; the most she
genuinely desires
in that direction is a spectacular martyrdom.
No woman delights in poverty. No woman yields when she can
prevail. No woman is honestly meek.
In their practical ethics, indeed, women pay little heed to the
precepts of the Founder of Christianity, and the fact has passed into
proverb. Their gentleness, like the so-called honour of men, is
visible only in situations which offer them no menace. The moment
a woman finds herself confronted by an antagonist genuinely
dangerous, either to her own security or to the well-being of those
under her protection--say a child or a husband--she displays a
bellicosity which stops at nothing, however outrageous. In the
courts of law one occasionally encounters a male extremist who tells
the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even when it is
against his cause, but no such woman has ever been on view since
the days of Justinian. It is, indeed, an axiom of the bar that women
invariably lie upon the stand, and the whole effort of a barrister who
has one for a client is devoted to keeping her within bounds, that the
obtuse suspicions of the male jury may not be unduly aroused.
Women litigants almost
always win their cases, not, as is
commonly assumed, because the jurymen fall in love with them, but
simply and solely because they are clear-headed, resourceful,
implacable and without qualms.
What is here visible in the halls of justice, in the face of a vast
technical equipment for combating mendacity, is ten times more
obvious in freer fields. Any man who is so unfortunate as to have a
serious controversy with a woman, say in the departments of
finance, theology or amour, must inevitably carry away from it a
sense of having passed through a dangerous and almost gruesome
experience. Women not only bite in the clinches; they bite even in
open fighting; they have a dental reach, so to speak, of amazing
length. No attack is so desperate that they will not undertake it,
once they are aroused; no device is so unfair and horrifying that it
stays them. In my early days, desiring to improve my prose, I
served for a year or so as reporter for a newspaper in a police court,
and during that time I heard perhaps four hundred cases of so-called
wife-beating. The husbands, in their defence, almost invariably
pleaded justification, and some of them
told such tales of
studied atrocity at the domestic hearth, both psychic and physical,
that the learned magistrate discharged them with tears in his eyes
and the very catchpolls in the courtroom had to blow their noses.
Many more men than women go insane, and many more married
men than single men. The fact puzzles no one who has had the
same opportunity that I had to find out what goes on, year in and
year out, behind the doors of apparently happy homes. A woman,
if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so
sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems
sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps
Almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary
man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The
hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and
stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of
a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and
summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in
amour--all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest.
To be the object of the oafish affections of such a creature, even
when they are
honest and profound, cannot be expected to
give any genuine joy to a woman of sense and refinement. His
performance as a gallant, as Honor de Balzac long ago observed,
unescapably suggests a gorilla's efforts to play the violin. Women
survive the tragicomedy only by dint of their great capacity for
play-acting. They are able to act so realistically that often they
deceive even themselves; the average woman's contentment, indeed,
is no more than a tribute to her histrionism. But there must be
innumerable revolts in secret, even so, and one sometimes wonders
that so few women, with the thing so facile and so safe, poison their
husbands. Perhaps it is not quite as rare as vital statistics make it
out; the deathrate among husbands is very much higher than among
wives. More than once, indeed, I have gone to the funeral of an
acquaintance who died suddenly, and observed a curious glitter in
the eyes of the inconsolable widow.
Even in this age of emancipation, normal women have few serious
transactions in life save with their husbands and potential husbands;
the business of marriage is their dominant concern from adolescence
to senility. When they
step outside their habitual circle they
show the same alert and eager wariness that they exhibit within it. A
man who has dealings with them must keep his wits about him, and
even when he is most cautious he is often flabbergasted by their
sudden and unconscionable forays. Whenever woman goes into
trade she quickly gets a reputation as a sharp trader. Every little
town in America has its Hetty Green, each sweating blood from
turnips, each the terror of all the male usurers of the
neighbourhood. The man who tackles such an amazon of barter
takes his fortune into his hands; he has little more chance of success
against the feminine technique in business than he has against the
feminine technique in marriage. In both arenas the advantage of
women lies in their freedom from sentimentality. In business they
address themselves wholly to their own profit, and give no thought
whatever to the hopes, aspirations and
amour propre of their
antagonists. And in the duel of sex they fence, not to make points,
but to disable and disarm. A man, when he succeeds in throwing off
a woman who has attempted to marry him, always carries away a
maudlin sympathy for her in her defeat and dismay.
But no one
ever heard of a woman who pitied the poor fellow whose honest
passion she had found it expedient to spurn. On the contrary,
women take delight in such clownish agonies, and exhibit them
proudly, and boast about them to other women.
